Virtualisation giant VMware has announced ‘VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery’, a service which provides a continuously available recovery site if a VMware data centre hits the skids.

The system, which promises an RPO (recovery point objective) of 15 minutes, offers 1 terabyte of storage from a minimum pricing point of $835 a month, with the service available in all five of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service data centres in the US and UK.

The overall effect is that VMware has joined the disaster recovery game head first, with the virtualisation biz offering ease of access, security and cost with ‘a simple, automated process for replicating and recovering critical applications and data in a warm standby environment at a fraction of the cost of duplicating infrastructure or maintaining an active tertiary data centre.’

“We continue to aggressively execute our hybrid cloud vision, delivering capabilities like DR that businesses can use …

Back in September, Nirvanix announced to its customers that they had two weeks to move its data before the company went down the plughole.

As the enterprise cloud storage provider waved the white flag, Gartner research director Kyle Hilgendorf noted in a blog post that the analyst house’s paper on cloud exit strategies was one of the least popular in the collection.

“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments,” he demurred. “They are an afterthought.”

This is an issue that patently needs to change. As Hilgendorf asserted, recovery in the cloud may not be sexy, but they’re just as vital as moving to the cloud, whether it’s through natural disasters or company shutdowns.

The good news is that there are plenty of options out there, from niche providers to the big guys, such as VMware, and IBM, who added …

Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Practice, Jens Butler, Principal Analyst, IT Services

Cisco has announced its creation of a global cloud platform, branded Intercloud. It has also named some of its initial partners, which include a variety of cloud infrastructure players: Telstra, Allstream, Canopy, Ingram Micro, Logicalis Group, MicroStrategy, OnX Managed Services, SunGard Availability Services and Wipro. Although it is not a large group, it does include a mix of telcos, managed services providers, IT services providers, distributors, and resellers. As you would expect, they all have longstanding relationships with Cisco and were developing cloud services independently prior to this announcement.

Cloud services will become part of the Cisco Powered program, and Cisco plans to sell them through its channel partners and directly to enterprise customers. These cloud services will be more complex than those that Cisco sells today. This is not Cisco’s first attempt at providing global cloud …

By David Linthicum

Healthcare providers and payers that utilize cloud platforms to store and access personnel records (and like data) are probably storing protected health information (“PHI”), which is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”). Rules now in place govern the use of cloud computing to store health-related data, including personnel-related data.  The consequences for failure to comply can be severe to a company’s bottom line, including some heavy fines and PR nightmares.

In March of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) finalized the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, which made the regulation more cloud friendly.  This rule expanded HIPAA’s applicability beyond covered entities (health care providers and/or payer) to business associates. By definition, a “business associate” is a person or entity that creates, receives, maintains, or transmits PHI in the course of fulfilling certain functions or activities for …

By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

After a long wait, Game of Thrones Season 4 has officially started (no spoilers for the first episode of season 4 – I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy).  

Amidst the action and excitement, there are some lessons IT can take away from seasons 1-3 of the show. Here are five of them:

1) The war lies to the North

After Robert Baratheon dies, there is all out war for rule of the Iron Throne and control of the Seven Kingdoms. Joffrey Lannister usurps power after the passing of the king and executes the Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark. This sparks Ned’s son Robb to march on King’s Landing to attempt to overthrow Joffrey. Meanwhile Robert Baratheon’s younger brother Renly, his older brother Stannis, and Daenerys Targaryen are also all raising armies to try and defeat Joffrey. By the …

Ian Brown, Senior Analyst, IT Services

Accenture and Orange Business Services (OBS) have formed an alliance to support large enterprises with their cloud strategies. Accenture will provide expertise and skills in the planning, implementation, and management of cloud services with an industry solutions focus. OBS will provide its end-to-end infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and associated managed services.

This isn’t the first example of Accenture partnering on cloud services: it already has agreements with Dell and Microsoft. The significance of this alliance is that OBS is European and has cloud data centers in France. It is mutually beneficial in that it provides Accenture with a pragmatic means to allay European customers’ current sensitivity to data privacy issues, while OBS benefits from partnering with a leading SI that has the industry solutions skills it lacks.

Initially, the alliance will have most relevance to enterprises headquartered in France. OBS stands to gain most in …

Enterprise file-sharing platform provider Egnyte has today announced significant expansion in Europe, hiring a general manager and opening up a London branch.

The company has moved Mark Rattley to the top EMEA job, with the former EMC vice president of sales coming on board as vice president and general manager for the new Egnyte Europe.

Egynte isn’t just looking to London for expansion however, with a data centre previously opened in the Netherlands, as well as a 25-strong design and engineering team based in Poland.

Vineet Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Egnyte. Having worked in the States for over 20 years, a style that he describes as a “little slow and deliberate” means that it’s taken this long for his company to expand outside of the US.

Yet the Egnyte CEO has legitimate reasons for this reticence, telling CloudTech that he had stedfastly refused the board …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

SAP’s recent user event in Orlando, Florida, organized and co-hosted by WIS Pubs, drew 1,800 attendees, all keen to learn new developments surrounding SAP’s BI and HANA in-memory analytics offerings. The key theme revolved around HANA as a platform for driving business innovation through technology and process disruption – clearly, HANA continues to sit front and center in SAP’s product strategy.

SAP’s challenge is to accelerate adoption by encouraging, not forcing, undecided customers towards HANA without clear and safe migration paths, but it should remember that its IT buyers are relatively conservative and will consider new technology options and changes at their own pace, not SAP’s.

HANA both creates and solves business disruption

SAP continues to reinvent itself as an innovative software-maker. At this event it emphasized business innovation through technological disruption. SAP’s efforts to position HANA …

Exclusive Nikola Pizurica, president of the company which provides the OneBigDrive cloud storage app, has told CloudTech that while Microsoft renaming its storage biz OneDrive “could lead to some confusion” for consumers, the company is focused on its own goals.

“We are going our way,” he affirms, although adding he was ‘surprised’ at the time that Microsoft chose to rename to OneDrive.

Redmond had courted angry companies following the renaming  – and it’s worth noting that the latest name had to be changed from SkyDrive following a successful legal challenge from BSkyB in August.

Microsoft’s relaunch to OneDrive was first reported on January 27, while OneBigDrive was launched on January 28. Yet the domain for OneBigDrive was registered back in November 2012, and development started in April 2013.

“We had no idea that Microsoft [was] going to change their name from SkyDrive to OneDrive,” Pizurica [left] explains, although adding …

The CEOs of leading companies are already striving to create an agile business model – one that responds quickly to competitive pressures and shifting market demands. Commercial agility often requires a corresponding accelerated business technology deployment. Meaning, the IT requirement is for applications to be provisioned in hours – not weeks or months.

That’s a tall order for many corporate IT departments. Regardless, it must be done. More often than not, it’s accomplished via a cloud services-based methodology.

Savvy executives that proactively migrate their IT infrastructure to a cloud-centric architecture will generate new revenue that could surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017, according to the latest market study by IHS.

Global business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will reach an estimated $174.2 billion this year – that’s up by 20 percent from $145.2 billion in 2013. By 2017, enterprise spending …